Camp says Perrys ‘took quick action’ to get rid of N-word at hunting site

Representatives for Rick Perry - shown in Hampton, N.H., on Saturday - said claims in a Washington Post report tying his family to a racist name of their hunting grounds are “incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous.” (AP photo)

By AMANDA SAKUMA and RICHARD S. DUNHAM, Washington bureau

Rick Perry’s presidential campaign on Sunday strongly disputed a Washington Post report that tied the Texas governor to the racially offensive name of hunting grounds his family had leased near his hometown of Paint Creek.

Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan said the word “Niggerhead,” which had been painted on a rock on the property, was painted over before Perry launched his political career as a Democrat in 1984.

“A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible,” Sullivan said in a statement on Sunday.

But the Post article quoted several sources saying that the racist epithet was visible for years after Perry’s rise to power in Austin. According to the Post, recent photos of the 5-foot rock show the faded, yet visible, letters N and two G’s scrawled on the surface — remnants of the camp’s racially charged past.

Perry is seeking to defuse a potential controversy at a time he has been sinking in Republican presidential polls. But Georgia businessman Herman Cain, who surged into third place in the most recent Fox News poll of likely GOP primary voters, said the issue reflected badly upon the conservative Texan.

“(There) isn’t a more vile, negative word than the N-word,” Cain, the only black candidate in the GOP field, said on Fox News Sunday.

Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, questioned the Perry campaign’s claims about the timing of the whitewash painting of the racist epithet.

“Yes, it was painted over,” Cain said on ABC’s This Week. “But how long ago was it painted over? So I’m still saying that it is a sign of insensitivity.”

“Mr. Cain is wrong about the Perry family’s quick action to eliminate the word on the rock, but is right the word written by others long ago is insensitive and offensive,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan also asserted that Perry’s family never owned the parcel, and that the governor himself only signed onto the lease from 1997 to 2007. According to Sullivan, Perry has not been to the ranch since 2006.

Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy at the NAACP, criticized Perry’s response, saying the governor did not recognize the symbol of race relations that the term represents. For Shelton, it is far more than “an offensive and vile term” painted on a rock.

“At least on the surface, he seems to be covering it up for political expediency — white washing — but of course it has shown through,” Shelton said.

The NAACP in Texas took an active role in eliminating the use of offensive names on state geographical place names in the early 1990s when then-Austin NAACP president Gary Bledsoe discovered 33 such names within Texas, Grand Prairie branch president Angela Luckey said.

“I was horrified when we found out the name of the creek in Mexia, but people in the community have apparently decided to live with it even though it was very much offensive to many of them,” Bledsoe said. “I would hope all that find such a name would find it offensive and reprehensible. …”

Perry’s campaign emphasized in its statement that the Texas Legislature took up the issue in 1991, passing a bill to erase racist geographical names. For the derogatory name on his own property, Perry said his father “took the first opportunity he had to paint over the offensive word” after they leased the 1,070 acres in Throckmorton County in the early 1980s.

‘It was so blatant’

In over two dozen interviews with local residents and those affiliated with the property, the Post paints a different picture, suggesting that the epithet remained visible during the majority of Perry’s political career.

“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’” one anonymous source told the Post, saying they recalled seeing the rock with the offensive word clearly visible to visitors.

Another anonymous person who was quoted in the Post story expressed shock at the large rock and the words written on it while visiting the camp once in the early 1990s — after Perry had switched parties and had been elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

“I was just so taken aback that it was so blatant, so in your face,” the source said.